Best Practices - Working with Multiple Point Clouds in Revit

Key Principles

Throughout this best practices article, the following key principles will help you be successful:

• Registration
  Most commonly, a point cloud consists of multiple laser scans that are taken in different locations of the building, and positioned relative to each other through a process called "registration".  Registration is completed by finding common points between different laser scans, and using those common points to calculate the exact location and orientation for each scan.
   
• Indexing
  Point Clouds typically consists of huge amounts of data. In order to rapidly access that data within Revit, a process called Indexing must be carried out to optimize the data structure for rapid access. This process is called indexing.

Best Practices

The following practices are recommended for optimal efficiency working with large laser scans within a Revit project:

1. Aggregate Scans within Scanner Software
   Once Registration is complete within the scanner software, you typically can group scans into Clusters.  It is a best practice to group those scans based upon logical regions in your building, which will likely align with the Views you have created within your Revit project.  For example, you can have a group for exterior scans, a group for each floor, or sections of each floor.  Once grouped, you can export the group to an individual point cloud file.
    
2. Index and Link the Aggregated Files
   With individual files for each aggregated scan, you can now go through the indexing process to organize the data into the PCG file format for Revit's point cloud engine.  Once indexed, be sure to link in each PCG file using the "Auto - Origin to Last Placed" option in the "Link Point Cloud" dialog, as seen below.

   

• Toggle the Visibility of Aggregated Scans
  Once linked into your Revit project, you can now easily control visibility of Scans within the Visibility/Graphics menu for Views.  Note that you do not need to hide scans that do not show up in the View Range of your Project View, Revit does not access them.